I’ve mentioned the weekly movie night I’ve been curating for the last 16 years on this blog many times before—so much so, it has its own sub-category.

This week will mark the 700th unique feature-length film we’ve screened. There had been more movie nights than that, but I’m not counting a limited number of repeat screenings and the few nights when we watched nothing but shorts.

Partly due to this milestone and partly because we were stuck for topics to talk about, this Sunday’s episode of Cinema Smackdown was devoted to the primordial-ooze days of movie night. I blathered on at length about how this phenomenon came about, the first ten or so movies that were screened, and my close personal ties to this gathering (bizarrely, I now live in the original venue where movie night began in September of 2003).

Cinema Smackdown continues apace, with Michael and I doing weekly shows, almost without failure (admittedly I missed one show a couple of weeks ago because I was so damn sick). I don’t like to constantly promote it because it feels like every time I blink, we’ve done another episode. But if you’d care to delve deeper into the lore of movie night, let me point you at the last hour of radio we did.

You have two options to listen in. You can watch the raw studio feed I post on my YouTube channel (don’t be shy about subscribing or watching other episodes). That will let you listen in on our chatter before and after the show, as well as during commercial breaks. Or, if you want the actual broadcast version, complete with better audio, the news from the top of the hour, and the aforementioned ads, you can check out the CJLO archives. Here’s a direct link to the episode in question.

Share this:

Like this:

We’re now 15 volumes in, and I’m proud to have been a part of TheMX Books of New Sherlock Holmes Stories project since volume one back in 2015. My latest Holmes & Wiggins story, “The Adventure of the Ambulatory Cadaver,” will be appearing in this round of 66 original stories.These Kickstarters are the best way to get your copies first and for a lower price. Check the higher tier pledges to get the earlier editions as well, in your choice of hardcover, paperback, or PDF. As usual, all profits go to charity.

Now that Undershaw (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s home) has been restored to its former glory, profits will continue to go to the Stepping Stones school for children with learning difficulties, housed therein.

Since all my Holmes stories to date involve Wiggins of the Baker Street Irregulars, you might also want to check out David Marcum’s recent article about children in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Six adventures in, and my contribution to this facet of the Sherlockian universe is worth a mention. Number seven is in the works.

Share this:

Like this:

It’s an Oscar year so uninspiring that the Academy couldn’t even book anyone to host.

This is the second year I’ll be unplugged from my former cable service, and I’m doubly disengaged and more disinclined than ever to seek out a stream or screening. If it weren’t for my friends and colleagues David Fine and Alison Snowdon being nominated for their animated short, Animal Behaviour, I probably wouldn’t bother at all. Even so, the Oscars are old hat for them. They already won a golden statuette for Bob’s Birthday years ago. Been there, done that. I suppose the drama of Alison’s double lung transplant during production makes for a compelling backstory to the film. Maybe.

No shit. That happened.

Other than that, the Oscar ceremony is poised to be even more boring than usual.

If you want some more contrarian opinions about the Oscars (which will probably be more entertaining than tonight’s show) we spent this afternoon’s entire episode of Cinema Smackdown talking about it on CJLO.

Check out the rest of my YouTube channel for other recent episodes. Subscribe to get the raw video feed with all the inappropriate off-air chat that happens during the commercial breaks. You can also listen to the actual broadcast versions on the CJLO website archives, complete with better audio and ads.

We’re live online and on 1690 AM every Sunday afternoon at 2:00 pm Eastern Time.

Been there, done that a couple of times before. But this time it was a whole new level of bad. Sure I felt like I was dying on those previous occasions, but I’d never been reduced to slapping myself in the face—hard—to maintain consciousness. I might have called 911, but the phone was an impossible distance away from the cooling surface of the bathtub side, where I was resting my flop-sweating head and waiting for my body to make its coin-flip choice of which end was going to handle the evacuation.

I was alone and far from assistance. Well, almost alone. One cat—the smart one—figured out something was wrong, and tried to comfort me with meows and face rubs, ignoring the danger she was putting herself in, crossing one potential line of fire repeatedly. I made a note to leave the tap running for the felines in case I didn’t make it. That would take care of their water supply until my body was found. As for food, I’ve always made it clear that my pets are free to help themselves to my mortal remains in order to survive until rescue arrives. What do I care if I’m dead? I’m not using the old meat-sack anymore, I’m not into open-coffin funerals, and the crematorium ovens don’t care how pretty your corpse is.

After you go through this sort of experience and you realize you’re not going to die after all, your thoughts go to figuring out why this horrible thing happened. I pointed a few fingers, and I did my research about the gestation periods of different types of food poisoning. In the end, I had to admit it was my own damn fault. The exact thing I’d been joking about with friends for the last year had come to pass. I’d poisoned myself.

I’m moving soon. And I’ve known this for many months. Among all the books and DVDs and collections in my house was a long-standing horde of emergency food. I’m in Montreal. I lived through the great ice storm of 1998. Disasters happen. Supply lines can get cut off. I like to have enough canned food on hand to see me through at least a month or two of interrupted services. If the shit hits the fan and store shelves empty out, I’d prefer to avoid the bread lines.

And, you know, if there’s a zombie apocalypse, you really don’t want to have to go outside for anything.

It was only once I started going through stuff that I realized how long my long-standing horde had been stashed away in those basement cupboards. Every single can down there was several years past its expiry date.

Which, of course, was no big deal. Expiry dates on cans of food are mostly bullshit, unless the can got dented or corroded in some way. Otherwise, it’s an airtight seal that will allow you to enjoy the tin-encased contents well beyond any end of the world you’ve happened to survive.

Right? Right.

Admittedly, I composted all the canned peas and carrots and corn and beans. Canned vegetables taste like crap compared to their fresh counterparts. I’d bought them for an emergency, and there was no emergency unfolding that was dire enough for me to subject myself to that bland crap, much as I hate waste.

But the canned fish… Ah, the canned fish. Again, fresh is better, but cans of tuna and salmon can make for a fine sandwich. So, over the past year, I’ve been eating two or three of those cans per week, always subjecting them to a thorough sniff test first. Always cautious about what I was about to put in my body.

And it worked out fine right up until it didn’t.

I think it was the can of salmon I had for breakfast that morning that did me in. I can’t be sure. But it’s a prime suspect and, just in case, I threw the rest out. Then I threw out more stuff that was probably fine but had crossed the expiry date. Then I threw out stuff that should be completely inert and incapable of going bad, just because it had committed the unpardonable sin of getting old.

It all had to go, and it all went, without pity. Waste be damned.

I now have a very modest pantry. There’s nothing I want to stock up on until after this move happens and I have new cupboards to fill.

I dodged a bullet this time. I’ve mended my ways. And now I’ll have to come up with a new way to neglect myself to death.

Share this:

Like this:

Epitaph, the sequel to Necropolis, is finished and being edited for release. Newsletter readers already got their sneak peek of the cover. Today is the day I put it out there for a more general audience.

The next newsletter, which goes out tomorrow, will include a link to the prologue and first three chapters (which just happen to end on Christmas). This is part of my Christmas promo that will also see Necropolis and Sex Tape (a tale that takes place between Christmas and New Year’s) available for free on Amazon throughout the coming week.

If you want to get the jump on reading the second book in The Necromancer Thanatography, hit that newsletter subscriber button to the right of this post and sign up before the next mailing goes out.

Share this:

Like this:

This is my grandfather, Francis Simmons, in The Great War. He fought for England, working closely with the teams of horses that hauled artillery around the front. He survived the war and married Mary Wyatt in 1919. They left Bristol and moved to Canada, settling in Montreal in 1922, where he got a job with Dominion Bridge. They had eleven children, three of which didn’t survive infancy. In 1942, two years after my father, the last one, was born, Francis came home from work and promptly died of the family curse—heart disease. He was about the same age as I am now.

The Great War (renamed World War One after it got a sequel) ended 100 years ago today. I’ve been lax about Remembrance Day in recent years. I haven’t been out to the ceremonies at cenotaphs; I haven’t been wearing the new improved poppies (now with a more true-to-form black centre as opposed to the green of my youth).

Today I made the effort, freezing my balls off on a sunny but bitter November day. I walked out to Montreal West for the festivities there. Not a lot of people gathered around the park statue for the traditional 11:00 am start (the time of day the guns fell silent), but the main show was only scheduled to begin at 12:15. That’s when people gathered outside the United Church up the street. I joined the procession and the piper, returning to Edgar Davies Park, which was, by then, filled with several hundred more people. It was the biggest turnout I’d seen since my childhood, back when we still had First World War vets and plenty who had served in the Second World War and Korea.

As of a couple of years ago, the very last of the Great War vets died. Too young to have been legally enlisted at the time, they lived well past a century, some lasting long enough to see the 100th anniversary of the start of their war. But now it’s all passed from living memory. And today, the remaining Second World War vets are in their 90s or older. There were exactly two with us in the park. A rare breed, rapidly growing scarcer.

The showing was solid for this centennial. I thought about the grandfather I never met, tending his war horses, as I got to hang out with a couple of gorgeous police mounts named Wifi and Merlin, standing guard over the ceremony. It’s good to do this every once in a while, and I’ll try to go again next year. No promises, but it’s always on my mind, every November 11th.

We’re all told to remember the wars, the sacrifices, and the dead. And it’s an important tradition. But I know it won’t last forever. The World War Two vets, those who fought in Korean, those from more current conflicts…they’ll all go the way of the Great War vets eventually. And, like all traditions ultimately do, Remembrance Day will get swallowed up by the passage of time. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you heard of anybody going to a memorial for the terrible losses of the Punic Wars?

That’s as it should be. The goal isn’t to keep the memory of our wars alive forever. The goal is to go so long without a war, nobody remembers what they’re like at all, and nobody considers starting a new one as a solution to common human conflict.

Share this:

Like this:

Just in time for the release of “Halloween,” the latest film in that 40-year-old franchise, and only the third one to simply be called “Halloween”—Michael, Tess and I reconvene for another episode of Cinema Smackdown.

This round we discuss the long history and many entries in the slasher sub-genre. Whether you’re on Team Myers, Team Voorhees, or Team Krueger, there’s plenty to cover, including a lot of interesting, obscure specimens you may have never heard of.

Like this:

My appearances on CJLO’s Cinema Smackdown number far too many to keep track of. I’ve been at it for a couple of years now and, with the new format and time, hardly an irregularly scheduled episode goes by without my participation.

Eyestrain Productions is not brimming with high-tech A/V equipment. I, infamously, don’t even own a smartphone. But I’ve taken to recording recent episodes with an old Flip. The visuals are hardly compelling, the lone-mic audio attempt to capture an hour of chatter in the room is dodgy, but you work with what you have.

The last three episodes are up on my recently minted YouTube channel. The first one is a straightforward two-shot, despite the fact there are three people doing the show. Reviewing the footage and watching myself fidget in front of the camera for a full hour was unnerving, so the next two episodes feature an uninspiring view of a station microphone, while capturing slightly better audio than previously with my own vastly inferior in-camera mic.

There’s an archive of old Cinema Smackdown episodes on CJLO’s website, but they’re always late to be posted, and early to be rotated off. This is my attempt to preserve some shows for posterity, because occasionally something really insightful gets said, or a genuinely funny joke gets cracked.

This blog post marks the first major announcement that I’m even doing this. With enough views, I might be compelled to buy a better camera and microphone. We’ll see how it goes. But if you miss one of our live-streamed shows (Sundays at 2:00 pm, when we manage to collect ourselves for an actual appearance), they’ll be uploaded to my channel soon after. The sound may not be as crisp as it is on air, but on the plus side you can hear what we’re talking about during the commercial breaks, which may not be fit for broadcast.

Share this:

Like this:

I’ve probably spent too many recent blog posts bitching about elements within the writing/publishing business. And believe me, I have plenty of other complaints I could air. But I don’t want this to turn into a grouse session. Having said that, this will sound like another scathing criticism. But it isn’t. This was perfectly professional. I just thought it was funny.

Rejection letters. Every writer has seen plenty. I’ve been around long enough to have received them when they were actual letters, in the mail, with addresses and stamps and everything. Now it’s all email, but it’s the same difference. No more submitting manuscripts with a SASE (that’s self-addressed, stamped envelope for the young’ns). Of course, with the ease and inexpense of email, there’s no excuse for failing to get back to someone who’s submitted a solicited story. Form letters are still the norm, but now they can be copied and pasted in mere moments. Anyone in the business who can’t be bothered to at least do that much to turn down a professional inquiry or manuscript is, in turn, no professional.

I have a story I’ve tried repeatedly to find a home for—stubbornly. It’s one of a handful I have that doesn’t thematically fit in with the two or three collections of shorts planned for somewhere down the road, so its best chance to see the light of day any time soon would be for me to sell it to somebody else’s anthology. It’s come close to a sale multiple times, making it to the final round of consideration on a couple of different books, only to be dropped before the finish line because there was simply no room left.

It happens. No biggie.

And it happened yet again, recently. Still no biggie.

The rejection email was standard but sweet. I’m sure everyone got the same one, but what amused me was a certain across-the-board presumption in it. It read, in part, “Please keep on writing, revising, and submitting to the very best markets you can find. It can be an arduous journey, but a fulfilling and rewarding one as well. And with each new story you write, you’re honing your craft. No effort at your writing desk is ever wasted.”

Words of encouragement. For a noob.

Me, I’ve been doing this professionally for thirty years. Maybe I should be flattered to be lumped in with hungry young writers full of energy and delusions. But I’m not. I’m old and broken and jaded.

A rejection email that reads, “No thanks,” is sufficient for me.

I guess that doesn’t seem as cordial, but it’s enough, and it lets both of us get on with our day. More importantly, it lets me know I’m free to peddle that story to the next publisher looking for something that fits a niche of a niche of an unpopular sub-sub-sub genre.

The story I’m talking about is unironically titled, “Wait Your Turn.” And it has, indeed, been waiting for a very long time now. Patiently.

I was going to wrap it up there, but screw it. I’m out of patience. “Wait Your Turn” is now up on my Patreon page at one of the lower tier levels. It is, after all, a horror story, and Halloween is coming up fast.

Incidentally, my Patreon page has been a bit of an embarrassment since the whales migrated south for the winter. Those high rollers made a big splash for a couple of months, but the party is over. Now I’m looking for more low-level backers just to get the number of subscribers up. A plan is formulating to richly reward those who chip in at only a buck a month. It’s just a matter of finishing a new wave of material—time, as always, permitting.

Share this:

Like this:

I listen to a fair number of writing podcasts that cover the business end of things. I never know when some random interview might offer up a relevant nugget of information that has direct bearing on my own endeavours. People like Joanna Penn, the folks at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast, and the lamentably defunct Self-Publishing Roundtable have uploaded many hundreds of hours of worthwhile material that serve as a guide for do-it-yourself authors.

As I’ve said, probably too often, the publishing industry has changed, and I’ve been seeing a real deficit in professionalism from the old guard. Often, it’s the bigger, established publishing houses that are the worst offenders. They do increasingly less to promote their stable of writers, while the options for new authors to bootstrap their way to a readership increase. My decision to go it alone remains firm.

Nevertheless, I don’t like to live in an echo chamber, listening to confirmation bias. Sometimes, a suggested video will cross my feed that provides another viewpoint to counter an argument I’m already sold on. No stranger to self-doubt, I like to remain open, asking myself if I made the right call.

One recent video I saw offered a bunch of reasons to not self-publish—to stick it out on the slush pile, go pro with the establishment press, avoid the solo-act fad. It was a well-produced video, from a YouTuber who was slick, presented himself well, and spoke with authority.

And he was completely full of shit.

The nitty-gritty details of why I disagreed with each of his points is academic and not likely to be of much interest to casual readers. But the way I knew he was full of shit may be more generally enlightening: I looked him up.

Simple, I know, but effective. I do this all the time when I listen to writer interviews. If they sound like an authority, I want to confirm they are an authority. So I check their credits and sales.

Sure enough, this guy had an Amazon author page, complete with photo and bio. Bearing in mind that his video, advising other writers to keep banging their heads against the wall of mainstream publishers, was uploaded to YouTube two years ago, I was eager to see how many books he’d since come out with, and how well they were doing.

He had one credit. One. And it was for a short story in an anthology. Hilariously, it was a collection I was also in, from 2015. And I remember what they were paying. It wasn’t the sort of money careers are made of.

In the two years that have passed between his video upload and now, he could have learned the ropes of how to manage his own little publishing empire. I did in that same time frame. And whatever novels he’s shopping around to indifferent publishers—who can sometimes take a year or more to reply to a single submission—could have been edited, designed, and printed for a growing readership by now.

I hope he’s doing well as a video blogger giving bad advice, because he’s not an author.